the western and southern countries. Its notes were gathered up and used as a remittance to the North and East. At the same time the local banks, whose notes had been paid into the Bank in the public revenue from lands, were unable to redeem them. The local banks thus became possessed of the capital of the Bank of the United States, and the latter was forced to pay out their notes in order to make any use of them, thereby neglecting its own circulation.
The dividends of the Bank of the United States were as follows: 1817, eight per cent.; 1818, five and one-half per cent.; 1819, nothing; 1820, nothing; 1821, four per cent.; 1822, five per cent.; 1823, five per cent. In the meantime, the United States was paying five per cent. quarterly on its stock notes, so that in 1824 it was calculated that $500,000 had been lost by the public Treasury through its shares in the Bank. The stock was at 122 1-2. Niles thought that the public shares should be sold.[1] The average of the dividends from 1817 to 1831 was a little over five per cent., paid semi-annually; so that the public investment showed, until that time, neither gain or loss.[2]
In a report on the currency, February 12, 1820, Secretary Crawford estimated that the circulation in 1815 was $1 millions and that it was greater in 1816. At the end of the year 1819, he estimated it at $45 millions. Nearly two-thirds of the circulation had been reduced to waste paper. The Secretary said: "As the currency is, at least in some parts of the Union, depreciated, it must in those parts suffer a further reduction before it becomes sound. The nation must continue to suffer until this is effected. After the currency shall be reduced to the amount which, when the present quantity of the precious metals is distributed among the various nations of the world in proportion to their respective exchangeable values, shall be assigned to the United States, when time shall have regulated the price of labor and of commodities, according to that amount, and when pre-existing arrangements shall have been adjusted, the sufferings from a depreciated, decreasing, and deficient currency will be terminated. Individual and public prosperity will gradually revive, and the productive energies of the nation resume their accustomed activity."
It took time for this liquidation and readjustment to be accomplished. Specie was imported in the winter of 1819-20, and in July of the latter year Niles said: "It is stated, and we think with probability, that there was never more specie in the United States than at this present time."[3] It was largely imported from Mexico, through New Orleans, during the next years.[4]
The international relations, however, had changed since 1816. The European nations, England especially, were struggling in 1819 to resume specie payments. Specie was moving from country to country in an unprecedented manner. Several of the great nations were contracting loans, partly in order to resume. The whole civilized world was in the midst of
